


Haunted

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Adolin deals with the realization that his sword is actually sort of a corpse, Adolin deals with things the way he always does, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Light Angst, by unloading emotionally to Shallan and then being charming, cosmere gift exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 13:07:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21446686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Adolin deals with the fact that his sword is a actually a corpse.
Relationships: Adolin Kholin & Mayalaran
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deoxydahlia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deoxydahlia/gifts).

> This is my Cosmere Gift Exchange fic for deoxydahlia! I hope you enjoy!
> 
> "Somewhere, Adolin was suffering gifts from the men. Probably swords. Lots and lots of swords."
> 
> (Sanderson, Brandon. Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive) (p. 1224). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.)

The night before his wedding, Adolin dreamed of Maya. 

She floated at his side like the spren that flickered around the bridgemen. But unlike those light, playful spren, she hung there like a storm cloud, slow and twisted and horrifying to behold. Scratched-out eyes looked right through him and wailed like a widow upon hearing of her husband’s death. All around them, soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms died and fell and bled out onto the ground until it seemed as though he and Maya were back in the sea of beads Shallan called Shadesmar, but the beads were all bright blood red. 

“I’m sorry,” he yelled over her shrieks. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, or even where they were and who these dying soldiers were supposed to be, but he needed say  _ something _ . 

It didn’t matter; she continued to scream without hearing his words. 

When he woke, the blankets of his bed were twisted and thrown this way and that. He took three deep, dream-dismissing breaths, then threw out his arm and summoned her. 

Ten heartbeats later, a cold sword hilt coalesced in his waiting hand. 

He shivered, and dismissed the blade. 

* * *

“It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel like my Shardblade is haunting me.”

Shallan looked up from her sketching, which up until then had held enough of her attention away from him for him to feel comfortable speaking the words. Her eyes were thoughtful. A coil of tension in between his ribs eased; some corner of his brain that learned from experience had been overlaying her face with the remembered faces of past, less emotionally invested girlfriends. He hadn’t  _ thought _ she’d dismiss his feelings on this, but, well. This was his first successful relationship. He hadn’t fully learned how those were supposed to work yet. 

“It’s not like anything’s really changed,” he continued, letting the words pour out of him like stormwater. “She still comes when I summon her and everything. But now that I  _ know _ about her, I can’t shake the feeling that she’s this ghost. After hearing those spren in Shadesmar talked about her like she was dead, it feels like every time I summon her, I’m calling up a dead body, and then sparing with it.”

Shallan’s spren Pattern hummed from its spot on top of the most recent page in her sketchbook. Shallan spared him a glance, then shrugged. 

“So nothing has changed, but now that you understand the situation differently, it feels different, right?”

“Exactly! I’m trying not to, but every once in a while I’ll be doing something completely normal or remembering using her and I’ll think  _ that’s a spren’s dead body. _ Which is very distracting when I’m supposed to be doing my forms and practicing my kata. I’m sure Zahel’s noticed by now, though he hasn’t said anything.”

She tapped her pen against her chin. 

“Hmm. Has she  _ done  _ anything lately? You know, since the battle?”

Adolin shook his head. 

“That’s part of what makes the whole thing so weird, honestly. I’ve been holding her corpse for  _ years, _ and even now that I  _ know, _ I can’t tell. When I summon her, she’s just- just a sword, you know? A sword worth kingdoms, but still a sword.”

Shallan’s pencil scratched across the page of her sketchbook with a sound like a rasping breath. She didn’t interrupt or offer any input of her own, but instead waited for him to say what he needed to say. 

“What if I’d never talked to her, Shallan? I’m the only one who does it, and if I weren’t my father’s son I’d probably get a lot more flack for it than occasional teasing. What if I’d just fallen out of the habit of talking to her before duels? She looked creepy enough as it is, with the, you know,” he gestured vaguely at his face, trying to convey both the wrongness of her vacant, scratched-out eyes, her screaming mouth, and her strange, twisted-vine skin. 

Shallan nodded understandingly, so he must have gotten the point across. 

“And then I get to thinking, what about all the other Shardblades? They’ve gotta be corpses too, right? Now, whenever I see one of the other Brightlords practicing with their Shardblades, the only thing I can think is  _ that’s a corpse in your hand. _ ”

He sighed. 

“I wish she’d do something, you know, just to prove she’s still halfway sentient in there, but at the same time I really don’t, you know? Consciousness seems so hard for her, and Renarin talks about how the other Shardblades scream all the time. I don’t think I could live with her screaming in my head all the time.”

Shallan scratched one last line into her paper, then set it aside. He glanced at it; some sort of complicated geometric pattern spilled across the page. 

“Pattern?” she asked. The barely-there disturbance on her sketchbook grew taller, somehow, as if it were sitting up off the page to listen to her. 

“Hmmm?”

“What do you think about Mayalaran?”

“Hmmm,” Pattern buzzed. “I think she’s tired. Coming back from the dead is hard, and it takes even unbroken spren a long time to develop a strong mental presence. Hmmm, yes. Tired.”

Well, Adolin thought, he was probably right about that. 

* * *

He was distracted in the practice grounds. 

On a purely physical level, his Shardblade felt exactly as it always did in his hands. Perfectly balanced, powerful, familiar. 

On another level, it felt weird even to hold it. 

Taln’s nails, he didn’t want to feel like this. He wanted to be comfortable around her, just like he always had been. He wanted to be able to talk freely to her, to treat her like an extension of himself. He wanted to give her the closest thing to the relationship Shallan and Kaladin had with their spren that he could give a voiceless weapon. 

He wanted to stop looking at her and thinking ‘ghost.’ 

The blade arched cleanly through the air as he moved to the next kata in the formation, but Adolin’s steps were a touch slow. Not enough to throw off the whole kata, but enough to compound his frustration. 

He started forcing himself through the steps faster and faster. Air whistled in his ears as he completed his turns like the beginning of a moan. He wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted it to morph into the moans of the spren with the twisted-roots face and missing eyes. 

He’d almost given up on the day’s practice when something tapped his shoulder.

His whole body jolted like a piece of grass at the touch of a horse’s tongue and looked around wildly. 

Lopen the no-longer-one-armed Bridgeman was hanging from a stalactite stretching down from the ceiling.

His hands and feet glowed with Stormlight as he clung to the stone walls of the cavern, perched just above the height of the closest doorway. 

He waved jauntily when he noticed Adolin’s eyes on him. Flitting around his shoulders was his spren, a girl about a handspan high made out of bluish light. Like Kaladin’s spren, if perhaps a little less self-aware. She copied Lopen’s wave. 

Mayalaran remained a cold, unchanging weight in his hands. Adolin wondered if she had been as happy go lucky as the Bridgemen’s spren, back before she broke.

“Hey there!” Lopen called out. “Captain Kaladin said to come get you! Brightness Navani wants to see you about something for the wedding!”

“I can’t get there if you frighten me to death,” he replied dryly. 

The bridgeman shrugged. “You see, my Prince, I wasn’t about to just walk up to you when you were swinging that sword around, you see? Could’a gone right through me.”

“You could have spoken up to get my attention.”

Lopen smiled. 

“Now, that wouldn’t have been as fun, now would it?”

He laughed, and Adolin felt the adrenaline leak from his blood. 

“Ha ha. Tell her I’m on my way, I’ve just gotta change out of my armor.”

As he lifted his arm and dismissed Maya, he wondered where she went when he dismissed her.

* * *

Adolin wondered if he could fall asleep without anyone noticing. 

On the one hand, falling asleep at your own prenuptial party was so gauche, he would have been surprised if even Sebarial did it. 

On the other hand, the elaborately-robed ardent in from of him was on his seventeenth prayer, and he showed no signs of stopping anytime soon. 

He tried not to think about his boredom, for fear of boredomspren giving him away, but there simply wasn’t much else to focus on. He wasn’t required to speak above the whisper required for his own prayers until it was time to receive the traditional wedding gifts, and everyone else who’d managed to cram their way into the vaulted chamber they’d selected for the pre-wedding ceremony was looking at the floor, heads bowed like top-heavy flowers after a light rain. 

Perhaps the most stimulating thing he could do was stare blankly at the walls. Though, to be fair, they weren’t uninteresting walls. The stone walls and floors gleamed in the white light of the diamond marks that filled the braziers, which had been arranged in a tight semicircle behind him, revealing seams of white crystal or swirling flecks of deep blue and red. 

He wished Shallan was here to tell him about them. Her Calling was natural history- surely she’d know some fun detail about what made stone form like that would distract him from the ardent’s droning. 

Then again, she also belonged to the deviatory of Purity, and he had never met another member of that deviatory so ill-suited to it, so perhaps he shouldn’t base any assumptions off her religious choices. 

Mayalaran rested across his shardplate-clad palms and thighs, majestic and silent and ghostly. 

But she’d come to him in fewer than 10 heartbeats. Surely that was a sign of life. 

_ But would he notice if that was her  _ last  _ sign of life? _

When he closed his eyes, Maya’s scratched-out ones stared at him, unseeing.

He shoved those thoughts away. This was exactly why he didn’t want to think about this right now. 

The ardent transitioned smoothly from the seventeenth prayer to the eighteenth, and Adolin continued to stare at the walls. 

The room had been chosen for how ostentatious it was, and while that had seemed like a good idea when Navani was talking about the importance of using this opportunity to showcase how unscathed they were by the furious fighting in Thaylenah, now that he was actually here it felt kind of silly. The floor was gently sloped, putting him on a higher level than everyone else and forcing the procession of gift-bearers to ascend a little ways in order to reach him. 

The first man, a Brightlord of middling standing, stepped forward and up as the Ardent’s prayer trailed off. He knelt smoothly several body lengths Adolin’s seat, then called forward two lower-ranking Ardents carrying a long bundle between them. 

“May the Almighty bless your union, Prince Adolin,” he said solemnly. 

The Ardents pulled back the top flap of cloth, revealing a well-crafted blade, with decorative flourishes along the middle that petered out as they neared the tip. 

_ What do they think I’m going to do with that? _ Adolin whispered to Maya, so low the sound was more a vibration in his throat than a fully formed question.  _ I already  _ have  _ a Shardblade. _

He smiled and gestured magnanimously to the kneeling lord, and the Ardents set it down on a low table to his left. 

The next man to approach was more immediately recognizable. He was a high-ranking member of Sebarial’s war camp; Adolin had seen him around multiple times while going to visit Shallan. He too was followed by an Ardent carrying a cloth-wrapped, sword-shaped bundle. 

_ “Are you seeing this, Maya?” _ he whispered. For a second, it was like he was coming out of the dueling ring, not receiving congratulations on his marriage. 

“May the Almighty bless your union, Prince Adolin,” the kneeling man intoned. “And may your sword be ever swift, and may all fall before it.”

_ “Of course people will fall before you,” _ he whispered to Maya. “ _ You’re a Shardblade.” _

The next man to step forward, this one wearing finely tailored clothes in Roion’s colors, was also trailed by Ardents. Their package was long enough and heavy enough that it took three of them to carry it, and the cloth was insufficient to cover the last few inches of the blade’s gleaming, deadly edge. This one they placed on the table with the other swords without waiting for his gesture. Sweat beaded on their face like the condensation of a newly-summoned Shardblade. 

“May the Almighty bless your union, Prince Adolin.”

_ “That one’s gotta be for decoration. Who could even lift it besides a soldier in Shardplate? It’s completely impractical! What’s the point of a sword like that, other than to put behind glass and invite people to ooh and ahh over?” _

He might have imagined it, but it felt like Maya had vibrated in his grip for just a second. His heart leaped into his throat, temporarily choking out anything else he might have said. 

The next Brightlord also presented him with a sword and a prayer for success in battle.

As did the next one. 

And the next one. 

_ “Is this supposed to be some sort of sex joke?” _ he asked after the fifteenth Brightlord offered him his fifteenth sword. _ “Is it that I’m getting married, and they’re trying to be metaphorical? Dad didn’t warn me about this part! He said it would just be like when he officially named me his heir!” _

“May the Almighty bless your union, Prince Adolin,” spoke the next Brightlord. 

In his palm Maya pulsed lightly, like she’d flickered in and out of existence for a heartbeat.

It was all he could do to keep a straight face instead of leaping to his feet with joy. 


End file.
